Something transformational is happening at this moment — something that has happened repeatedly across the globe and which as a phenomenon merits deep reflection.

What is happening? A society is once again being galvanized by someone who, in a moment of desperation, publicly attempted to destroy oneself. In this case, it was an Israeli man, Moshe Silman, who set himself ablaze at the conclusion of Saturday night’s massive social justice march in Tel Aviv (and whose life hangs in the balance).

The act, a political symbol of despair and powerlessness Silman executed by claiming the only thing over which he had power — his body — has spontaneously galvanized the country. Last night, thousands of protesters blockaded government buildings and blocked major highways across Israel, chanting, “We are Moshe Silman!”

Protesters block Tel Aviv's Ayalon Highway in solidarity with Silman.

Anger and disgust in the country is palpable. Numerous public officials, sensing the moment’s potential power, have felt compelled to comment on this “national tragedy.” And Silman’s suicide note, which was handed to fellow protesters before he lit himself (and which blames the government for his economic despair and the despair of the working poor in Israel) has become an iconic document representing the country’s pervasive societal inequalities.

Of course, Silman’s self-immolation reverberates loudly in the shadow of the political suicide which sparked Tunisia’s revolution and essentially sparked revolts across the Arab world. Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire to protest various humiliating indignities visited upon him by municipal officials. His death sparked such widespread and angry protests that, less than a month later, Tunisia’s President, Zine El Abidine (who had ruled for 23 years) was forced to step down.

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Hunger strikes that reach critical stages. Self-immolations. These are, at their core, simply forms of suicide.

Yet, consider this: at a time in which Israel has been rocked by Silman’s self-immolation, suicides (at a rate of 400 per year) go largely unnoticed. Sure, some may be mentioned in passing on the news, but overall they occur in the shadows.

Similarly, here in the United States, suicide rates for military personnel, which has risen to an average of one per day, have eclipsed the rate of combat fatalities. And yet, aside from footnotes in mainstream outlets, are citizens marching in the streets or raising their fists to a government largely responsible for their deaths? No.

However, during the Vietnam War era, several self-immolations by U.S. citizens played significant roles in sparking and sustaining anti-war protests. The first to set himself ablaze was a deeply spiritual Quaker named Norman Morrison, who self-immolated outside the Pentagon underneath Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera’s window to protest the war’s inhumanity.

In Errol Morris’ Fog of War, McNamera emotionally declines to talk about how profoundly the self-immolation affected both him and his family, but he wrote about the suicide’s profundity in his memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. He also wrote:

“Morrison’s death was a tragedy not only for his family but also for me and the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth. … I believe I understood and shared some of his thoughts.”

Consider this: he called Morrison’s death — a suicide, in essence — a national tragedy. And yet, while we all may find military suicides in particular and suicides in general to be a deeply tragic phenomenon, has a public figure ever called the non-political suicide of an individual citizen a national tragedy?

I couldn’t find such an instance.

Obviously, there are intentional distinctions to be made between one who, suffering gravely emotionally, chooses to end his or her life in the shadows and one who, also suffering gravely, chooses to transform their suicide into a public display of resistance.

The former, we can ignore, and often do, both because they happen quietly and because it disrupts our placid states to consider them.

However, with the latter, we have no choice. We cannot ignore them, for hunger strikes and self-immolations occur in broad view, and are targeted directly at us, demanding to be considered. And because we cannot ignore them, because there is something simultaneously perverted and profoundly moving about such acts of self-destruction, we are forced to acquiesce to the demand and consider them.

And what we see reflected back to us is the unspeakable desperation of the powerless. We see a human symbol of all that is wrong, and all that must be reparied.

And that vision has, at times, driven people into the streets, toppled governments and forced leaders to chance public policies.

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Another example with which I’m intimately familiar: Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories have long suffered from Israel’s policy of indefinitely detaining people without charge or trial for months and years at a time. (Overall, thousands of Palestinians have been detained administratively without charge or evidence brought against them).

And while protests were organized against this practice and the general treatment of those detained, they were largely small and ineffective. However, recently, Palestinians began going on hunger strikes to protest this policy and their treatment while being detained.

The result? When a Palestinian, Khader Adnan, reached a point of extreme danger, massive public protests erupted and international pressure was generated as people began to compare Adnan to Bobby Sands (the I.R.A. prisoner who died after a hunger strike).

Palestinians rally in solidarity with Adnan on February 15, 2012.

On the 66th day, Israel pledged to release Adnan from administrative detention if he would just do one thing: eat.

An act of self-destruction as resistance, as a political statement, had backed a governing coalition into a corner.

That is power.

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The people who engage in these acts have, themselves, been backed into a corner. They are powerless. They are suffering deeply — whether emotionally, financially, physically or spiritually.

So what is it, exactly, that causes societies which largely ignore the plight of suicide to become inspired and moved to action by the likes of Silman, Bouazizi, Morrison and Adnan? Is it a sense of responsibility? Is it rage? Is it a strange form of inspiration brought on by one willing to die to highlight the injustices many of us face?

It’s an unanswerable question, really. Though it’s a question that remains as Israel waits for Silman’s fate and the region continues to shift in the wake created by Bouazizi’s public death.

6 Responses to “On the (Unsettling) Power of Political Suicides to Galvanize a Society”

No one should ever respect or honor the horrific act. What every ounce of hope he had is completely gone. The state may have failed him to some degree, but so did his friends and family who obviously miss the warning signs.

@ don – The average person from anywhere doesn’t have all of the information and resources – highlight resources – that they need to prevent a suicide, especially when poverty is a factor. Most or all of the family members and friends of a suicidal person will either be unaware of the suicidal person’s intentions (warning signs can be easy to miss; sometimes, there are no warning signs) or they may be unable to take actions that would improve the suicidal person’s condition (if the suicidal person needs food, shelter, counseling, medical attention, a job, etc.) You shouldn’t blame Silman’s family and friends when we don’t know if and whether they could help him before things escalated to this point. In the case of Khader Adnan, there was almost nothing that his family could do for him while he was in administrative detention.

Also, it’s very important to note that secondary survivors (they being family members, friends, and colleagues who suffer trauma as a result of a loved one’s extreme trauma and/or death) are not to blame for their loved one’s suicide. It’s unfair to say that of them. Unless there’s a case in which a family member or someone is bullying and abusing a person who then decides to commit suicide, then it’s not the fault of anyone else. However, it can very much be at least in part the system’s fault for creating a system that basically sets some people up – impoverished or homeless people, people of color, LGBT people – to face sometimes unbearable hardship.

I refuse to blame the system when we do not have the whole story. As I pointed out, he contacted a Jerusalem Post reporter to deliver his plight. She asked for documentation to substantiate hs story and he never provided it.

With halacha and Jewish culture standing squarely against suicide as legitimate or permissible, the topic is a difficult one
to broach in Israel, and a suicide is always met with horror (as it should be).

And yet, here we have Silman and the mobilization of protesters in solidarity with him, not horrified by him.

I’m not condoning the act — but its power is simply an undeniable fact.

Well it seems ironic that on one blog you view a small harmless medical procedure with revulsion. yet on this blog, you view a horrific public suicide attempt as a form of heroism. With burns all over his body, Silman is going to have a life time of suffering that none of us could fathom. If this is what you and social protesters need in order to mobilize the public, I find it very troubling.

I juts hope you do not claim that suicide bombing is an act of heroism as well.

Gershon-Harris is one of those who exploits Silman’s suffering for his agenda

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=278302
My Word: Silman is no martyr By LIAT COLLINS07/20/2012 18:33
Those who try to exploit Silman’s tragedy are doing neither him nor their cause justice. PHOTO: ASAF KLIGER Like most Israelis, I didn’t know Moshe Silman’s name until after he set himself on fire at a social justice protest in Tel Aviv on July 14. Unlike most, however, I knew his story. It took me a few hours to realize that the 58-year-old man who hovered between life and death in the Sheba Medical Center burns unit, dying there on July 20, was my mystery caller.

On two recent Fridays I have received phone calls from a man desperate not so much for fame as for revenge. He wanted his story to be told.

He refused to give me his real name during our first conversation, but he couldn’t stop describing how he had been wronged by the National Insurance Institute and to a lesser extent the Income Tax Authority and the medical establishment. Although he was polite and soft- spoken, there was an undercurrent of aggression. Early on in the conversation, silently blessing whoever had given him my personal mobile number, I moved out of my living room so that my young son wouldn’t overhear what I was talking about.

I still do not know who suggested Silman call me: He didn’t say. It’s possible it was someone who had heard his story too often and wanted to pass the burden along.

My capacity for sympathy is not matched by quantities of patience but I listened to Silman – for I am now positive that’s who it was – for close to an hour that first Friday, acutely aware that I had abandoned my son to the TV and my Shabbat preparations to the grace of God. Acutely aware, also, that the man at the other end of the line was feeling lonely. Beyond lonely. Alone. Alone in a battle that was constantly being waged in his mind.

As the details of his story unfolded, I wondered how the clerks, social workers and medical staff with whom he had evidently been in touch coped. He had obviously spoken to other media people, too. I explained that his story – the one that the sight of his burning body has now scorched on our minds – could only be published under certain conditions. The most problematic, from his point of view, was the need for the media to ask the relevant office for a response. He told me others had said the same thing. I felt like my own responses were being tested: Was I lying? Had those who had advised him before me lied to him?

At some point I suggested that he publish his story on Facebook or a blog, where a private individual is not bound by the same regulations as the press. He said it was a good idea, and others had also suggested it.

After a while, when he returned to the same details yet again, as if he hoped to suddenly discover some new insight, I tried to bring the conversation to an end. He reacted in a way that today feels even more chilling. In a perfectly normal tone of voice, he threatened suicide.

I asked about his family (and he said something like he wasn’t in touch); I asked if he had a friend he could speak to (no), or a rabbi (eliciting a response along the lines of “I don’t belong to that sector”).

He seemed to calm down just by talking some more and told me he wasn’t really thinking of killing himself; he only wanted his story to be told.

I explained that if he sent me the documentation and details in writing, I would have a clearer picture of what could be done.

I also told him that if he did feel suicidal he could speak to his family doctor or even go to the emergency room if it was on Shabbat.

He dismissed that by telling me they would only lock him up (I think he said “again”). When I heard that he had been in a hospital emergency unit a few hours before he had self-immolated I felt a small stabbing pain – not a pang of guilt but the sting of sadness.

Someone else had also misread the warning signals.

We ended the conversation with him promising he would send me an email with the relevant information, although he still did not give me his real name or phone number.

The conversation played on my mind. On the Sunday, I kept an eye open for the email, but it wasn’t in my inbox. I wondered, once more, whether he wasn’t looking mainly for sympathy and checking my reactions and advice against what he’d already received.

Two or maybe three weeks later, again on a Friday, he called and apologized for not having emailed me. This time he gave me his first name and asked me to help him translate material from Hebrew into English (for payment). I politely but firmly turned him down and said he could probably find someone to help him closer to where he lived (in Haifa).

He wanted to go over the details again but I stopped him, asking for the written material. We wished each other “Shabbat shalom” but I felt my name was now on an ever-growing list of people he could not trust and had refused to help him. It was hard to escape the depth of his obsession at having been wronged, although he also seemed incapable of accepting any aid that was offered.

SILMAN’S STORY – the debt that had continued to grow and grow; the lack of any place to call home; the health problems; the failed business; even the solitude – is far from unique. I have heard similar sagas in Israel and read of similar cases abroad.

I mentally went over his words – and my response – even before I learned that a protester had set himself on fire; long before I realized who it was and that I would not be getting that email or another Friday afternoon call. Perhaps I was testing myself against the reactions and advice of others.

My response, however, has been different to that of several of my friends. Silman was a person – a unique and special person. He was also clearly a troubled man. He should not become the symbol of a social revolution. Those who now harness his burned body to their cause are exploiting him and his pain.

All over the world, people have bureaucratic encounters that incense them; mercifully few actually set themselves on fire. To “fume” to friends and anyone who will listen is a normal response; to self- immolate in the middle of a public rally is the last act of a tortured mind.

Things do need to change, but there is a difference between the flames of passion and setting the country on fire in a revolutionary zeal. That demonstrators on July 15 marched to the Prime Minister’s Residence and elsewhere chanting “We are all Moshe Silman” and “Let’s burn ourselves” is somewhere between disturbing and disgusting. If nothing else, it smacks of verbal violence and emotional blackmail.

Healthy change is a process of growth, it needs to be nurtured.

Reform needs courageous, and selfless leaders, not martyrs – and certainly not a martyr like Silman. This was no visionary. He was sadly a man who dwelt on old grievances and did not see a future even for himself.

Those who try to exploit Silman’s tragedy are doing neither him nor their cause justice. It would be more fitting and helpful to harness the compassion naturally felt when Silman brutally made his story known, rather than fan the flames of dissent and hatred. May his memory be for a blessing.

The writer is editor of The International Jerusalem Post.liat@jpost.com